So, this was the first year I participated in Ludum Dare. I had an idea for a dungeon relay race, where adventurers were passing gear back and forth to beat the clock. Coming from Angband, I was thinking about this in a turn-based, grid kind of way with procedurally-generated levels, etc. I thought I might try to do some graphics though, to make the game more accessible to people. I was kind of nervous about being able to finish in the time, especially since my idea for the game kept expanding outward.

48 hours later, I managed to (barely) finish the game (Quengon: Dungeon Relay), or at least, the parts of it I could get done in 48 hours. Toward the end I started feeling a lot of pressure and disappointment: I had planned to create a bunch of different types of monsters, but ended up only having orange goblins because I didn’t have time to draw more. I had a lot of different items that I wanted to make but failed to, and there were a lot of basic things I should have finished that I didn’t (the most egregious was not rotating weapons depending on what direction the elf attacks from). Leaving the sound effects and music to the last minute meant that the sound effects aren’t great and there is no music. And I failed to create a lot of in-game content to help players understand what’s going on.

That said, I did manage to finish the game (even with a 9 hour break to play a show), and the game seems to work pretty well (I haven’t seen any crashes yet). Given that I came in with very little preparation (a few PCG algorithms taken from Angband and Pygame) and that I don’t have any experience doing programming with SDL/Pygame I was glad that I managed to get something built. Also, I was really worried about the art, but actually I think my pixel art ended up being OK. I’m already thinking about “the next one” and while I don’t think my game will win any awards I think it’s something people will be able to play (assuming I can figure out how to package it for Windows/Mac tomorrow).

In retrospect I would have been better off with out using PCG to generate dungeon levels, since most players don’t see that many anyway. I could have used that time to place items and layouts in a more interesting and narrative way. Tons of little things I have heard over the years (don’t use square tiles, don’t make your tile the base unit, etc) were born out in my experience. I made sure to get 7-8 hours of sleep a night, although again I wish I had carved a few hours out of that.

My biggest regret is not leaving an hour for playtesting at the end. I ended up making the 7 items and 3 power ups in the game a bit too rare, which means that the decision of which items to pass on (or not), which is supposed to be a central piece of the game, kind of gets side-lined. I may try to do a post-LD release where I create a splash, an instructions page, a death screen, fix the sounds and fix the rarities.

Thanks to everyone who helped put this on and participated, especially those hanging out on IRC!